On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, rwh wrote: > Mike Miller wrote: >> On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, Justin Krejci wrote: >> >>>> The only guy I know and talked to uses BSD as the base for their >>>> products (and this is not a small embedded company) *exactly* because >>>> of the GPL and license requirements to distribute source code. >>> Yup, BSD based is the way to go. >> >> Not for the individual licensing his code, but for the individual who >> wishes to use code written by someone else. If you want to contribute >> something to the world, you definitely should not choose BSD for your >> license. The GPL will do much better in promoting the software and >> leading to further development. > > > That seems a bit simplistic. How many places/projects do you think might > want to use GPL but don't care to participate in the legal vagarities > revolving around GPL? If I license a commercial library I pay cash and > agree to restrictions on distribution. If I go the GPL route I don't pay > cash but I do have to buy into the social goals of the GPL and accept > some uncertaintly about IP liability. If I go the BSD route I only have > to accept some uncertainty about IP liability. You are writing from the perspective of the individual or group using the code written by someone else. I agree with you (see above), but the individual who wrote the code is the one who should prefer the GPL to the BSD license. > I 'grew' up during the days of the Apple II and CP/M and a lot of us > just put code out there in the public domain. So I have no problem with > the BSD approach. I've also worked on projects where a commercial > license was preferable and some where GPL was fine. It's fine to just give it away (a la BSD or "no license at all"), but it isn't as good for you, the developer, as distributing under the GPL. Now that you have the GPL, it is easy for you to license your software with the GPL instead of just giving it away. > I'm a bit surprised by your comment. I doubt there are any restrictions > on your published papers that would prevent me from extending what > you've done (in principle anyway, practice is a different matter) and > using it in a strictly commercial setting. That is essentially what the > BSD folks are doing. Every published paper has a copyright held by the publisher, but I don't think that is relevant. The thing you might not be getting is the difference between using code to accomplish something versus using code as part of another program. It is fine to use GPL code to, say, design a car and then sell the car and give no credit whatsoever to the developer of the GPL code. It is not fine to use GPL code within a program that you then distribute under a different license. So people might use some of my papers to discover genes that affect diabetes of blood pressure or whatever, and they owe me nothing (but they might cite my papers). On the other hand, they are not free to use a paragraph from my paper inside of their paper (not without quotation marks and correct attribution). > Two small corrections to some of the stuff I've seen flying by in this > thread. The code most people are referring to when they talk about MS > using 'BSD' code is the network stack. As I recall this predates either > GPL or BSD licenses. I believe it was put into the public domain as a > result of AT&T's failed suit against the UCal Board of Regents > distribution of the original BSD code which was based on AT&T's Unix > code. It might predate the most recent version of the BSD license that removed the requirement to repeat the "Regents" line all the time. Do you have a source for that? I couldn't find anyting about it. Another possibility is that many of us are misunderstanding the BSD license. Look at this: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070114093427179 http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/15/1757235&from=rss I'm not so sure he has that right. Distribution of a copyright notice is a bit different than distribution of a license, but IANAL. > It was also my impression that Apple's OS X was based on the same BSD > licensed by NeXT from Berkeley rather than FreeBSD, although parts of OS > X were ported from FreeBSD. I'm also pretty sure that Apple had been > posting back enhancements to FreeBSD - Wikipedia mentions the Base > Security Module being ported back from Apple's implimentation. They were > also contributing patches and features from Safari back to KDE's > Konqueror - at least until there was some conflict in priorities between > Apple and the KDE folks. That's nice of them, but the license is still such that OS X source is not available to us. I guess the message is that the BSD license doesn't force people to stop contributing code, but it doesn't force them to contribute either. I did not distinguish correctly between the BSD variants and said "FreeBSD" when it was something else - but the point is really that the license does not force Apple to share their source. OS X is making Linux a little less attractive and it is thereby slowing Linux development. That's how I see it, and it makes sense, but that isn't the sort of thing you can prove. > MS is another story, but really, do you want them contributing to the > code base :-) Yes!!! What they write has to be checked, of course. Mike